by Mindy Mejia
Every morning after that he asked if he could join her, feeling more perverse each time she turned him down. She left the campsite in the morning and wouldn’t return until dusk. He offered her a beer and the only chair at his fire when she walked by at night, which she politely declined as she zipped herself into the glow of her tent. Josiah wasn’t used to rejection, at least not the sexual kind. Generally, when he walked into the first bar in a new town, mascara-smeared eyes lit up. He was a drifter, an outsider, and his otherness offered what they craved, what—by definition—they couldn’t have in their everyday lives. The less he said, the more they wanted him and he understood it. Women sought him the same way he sought the wild. This girl, though, had already found her wilderness.
Hiking through the park during the day, he tried to answer the perpetual question that framed his life: where to head next. He’d been contemplating Canada lately, a good place for a man to be alone, but suddenly solitude had lost its appeal. He found himself hiking further into the park, circling the lake, trying to catch a glimpse of his elusive neighbor. She wasn’t beautiful, she might not even be interesting, yet there was something always dancing behind her eyes and he wanted to see what it did when it was set free.
At the end of the week when kids ran screaming through the campground with sparklers and someone lit illegal fireworks off on the other side of the lake, she was nowhere to be found. Her tent was dark and she wasn’t milling around with the other campers near the grills and playground. He wandered down to the beach and lay on the sand, watching the nation’s birthday saluted with the traditional spectacle of exploding gunpowder.
“A patriot, huh?”
Out of nowhere she appeared, easing down on her back next to him, and he was surprised by the force of the leap in his chest.
“More of a stargazer. I’m waiting for the smoke to clear.”
“Astronomy.” She shrugged her shoulders deeper into the sand, making a nest. “Let’s see who can name more constellations.”
That was the night he learned her name, that she was a graduate student from Iowa City, and that despite years of staring up at them he could only pick out one constellation in the entire sky—because Orion and Orion’s belt didn’t count as two. The next day Sarah let him kayak with her and the week after that he packed up his tent and drove to Iowa City, looking for a job.
He stopped drinking. Not right away, not cold turkey, but he didn’t hate every room so much he needed to make them spin anymore and he didn’t want to waste another night trapped in a jail cell, either. He pursued Sarah and leveraged her every swooning friend in his campaign to get her to date him without any concept of how dating actually worked. He was awkwardly honest, willing to describe every sexual misdeed, every rancid night behind bars. She laughed at each story, infusing them with a lightness he couldn’t have imagined before meeting her, like sliding into a mineral spring and experiencing that first buoyant heat.
He learned her likes and dislikes and the meaning of every tattoo on her body, but the most important discovery he made about Sarah Mason, one night when he walked her home after class, was that she also hated roofs. Her sister had locked her in a toy box when she was three and she’d been claustrophobic ever since. Lecture halls were tolerable if they had windows, but she couldn’t bear small waiting rooms, and the only time she’d tried boarding an airplane, she began hyperventilating and then screaming as soon as the cabin doors closed. So instead of asking to come in to her apartment, he found a bench overlooking the river and they talked all night, and when the sun rose, she kissed him until he forgot whether they were inside or out.
They went camping together, voyaging farther and farther into parks across the country with one tent and two kayaks, because Sarah liked having space to stretch out. He taught her to forage, how to distinguish the edibles and the medicinals from the indigestible and the poisonous. When they moved in together, tiny miracles began happening every day. She asked where he was going when he left in the morning; it mattered where he was, and whether he was sick or angry or thirsty or cold. Her love was a gift that asked for nothing in return. At night he gathered her close and talked about their cabin in the woods, because he couldn’t see himself anywhere now without her. You’re my sky, my everything, he whispered in the dark and he was right—until the day his son was born.
Lucas meant “illumination,” “light-giving,” and there was nothing more clear than the first time Josiah held his son and stared into his own eyes. Only a few moments in life have the power to unmake a man, and cradling that raw, barely formed human was Josiah’s first. He fell in love, and it was terrifying.
The next years were the happiest and the hardest. Josiah worked as much as he could, stockpiling money for some vague future debt whose shadow seemed to loom infinitely larger every month. They learned about car seats and that back is best, breast is best, the five s’s, and all the other hundreds of slogans and campaigns thrust into their lives by American baby culture. Ignoring as much of it as they could, they bought an infant life vest instead of a crib monitor and took Lucas down his first river at three months old. And Lucas was light-giving. He played games with his own shadow, entertained himself with bugs for hours, and scaled out of his crib to squirm his way in between his parents every morning before dawn so they could watch the sunrise together. Still, they couldn’t entirely escape the tedium and the rules. At Lucas’s first kindergarten conference they were admonished by the teacher that he should have been more socialized; Lucas looked at the other children like they were aliens and refused to stand quietly in line. Josiah laughed off her shaming, but it ate at Sarah the whole way home from the conference. She tucked Lucas into bed and stalked back to their living room, raging at the teacher with the assembly-line attitude, ripping up the conference papers, and when she whirled to hurl them at the trashcan—a blazing tornado of ringleted fury—an aneurysm burst in the frontal lobe of her brain and she fell backward, eyes open and staring at the cracked plaster of their ceiling.
That was the other moment. The worst moment. It was a strange thing to be thirty-two years old and know beyond all doubt you’d already experienced the highest and lowest points of your life.
When Josiah looked back on it later, from the lonely mouth of a forgotten river, he understood the price of Sarah’s love. His foster mother had warned him, but he hadn’t grasped at the time, with her penny-pinching ways, that cost meant more than money. Sometimes cost meant being carved down with grief. It meant fighting with the hospital to release Sarah’s remains to him because he wasn’t a legal relative and when they finally did, it meant lying awake at night wondering if she’d wanted to get married, if he’d made her sacrifice any portion of her infuriatingly finite happiness. Cost meant leaving Iowa City because he couldn’t face playing with Lucas in the parks or walking the pedestrian mall without Sarah. Her love weighed down the air, made it almost impossible to push in and out of his lungs, so they moved. And for the rest of his life, Josiah never kayaked again.
Nothing in this world is free, his foster mother said. You just haven’t found out what it’s gonna cost yet.
Lucas was his last, greatest gift and he was prepared to pay anything, to forfeit the entire world and everything in it to keep his son safe. They drifted from town to town, staying in one place for the school year but packing up as soon as the last day let out in June and disappearing into the wild. Zion, Yosemite, the Sawtooth mountains, the Grand Canyon. All his savings made sense now, they paid for the summers spent gazing at sunsets and exploring the craters of ancient volcanoes. Josiah taught him survival; it was all for Lucas now, everything he’d ever learned for this one giggling, scampering reason. Lucas could build a fire at eight years old and fillet his own fish to cook over it. He hoarded maps and began campaigning for their summer destinations as soon as Christmas was over, which they usually spent in a snow-packed tent somewhere near the latest rental. When they were camping, Lucas didn’t wake in a cold sweat crying for his mother
. They talked about her over the campfire, Josiah grafting his memories onto Lucas’s fading ones, and always found sites near the water where she would’ve wanted to be.
There were women, a whole new breed who saw “single father” as another asset in an already impressive list of attributes. They slipped their phone numbers to him with restaurant bills and at the laundromat, their eyes smug with intent. He hated them almost as much as he hated himself for being tempted. For wanting to betray Sarah’s love. One woman asked him to come look at her Honda and, when he came to her house, slid her hand up his arm and inquired how much more he charged for extra services. He ripped the radiator hose out of her car and left her screaming in her driveway.
After a summer spent in the Badlands they drove all the way up to Ely, a weathered cluster of stores and houses where the road ended at the edge of Minnesota. The town was surrounded by green—national forests, state parks, and a place called the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness that intrigued by its very name. The Boundary Waters, a boundary between countries, between worlds, dividing the life he’d had with Sarah and the one that had called to him from dark horizons since he was a child.
He found an advertisement in the Ely paper to sublet half of a duplex and drove their truck full of camping supplies and tools to a house with peeling paint and a patchy, dandelion-strewn lawn. The woman who answered the door was bone-thin with crocodile teeth and sharp, hungry eyes.
“Yes?” Her glance measured up Josiah, Lucas, and the truck behind them, loaded with everything they owned in the world.
“We called about the apartment.”
“Right. It’s your lucky day.” The rusting hinges shrieked as Heather Price opened the door wider. “There’s a special right now—first month free.”
8
* * *
NOW THAT WAS a half an hour well spent.”
As Officer Keisha Miller and I badged out, most of the eyes in ward two followed our every move. The normal fights over the TV had stopped, hands twitched, and several heads had sunk behind the protective barrier of the couches.
“It wasn’t my idea.” I’d advised Dr. Mehta that Lucas wouldn’t talk to the police, but pressure from the Duluth PD and the U.S. Forest Service had become intense, so we agreed to facilitate “an interview” with Lucas. Officer Miller, our liaison police officer, had asked question after question while Lucas clenched his fists and stared out the window. “He’s not ready to talk to the authorities.”
I inched her toward the stairs as she methodically folded up the Boundary Waters maps and shook her head. “Got a giant F.U. plastered to his forehead, if you ask me.”
“He’s a forensic mental health patient.” Three more of them were peering through the door of the ward, tracking the receding flash of the officer’s tie clip and badge.
“I just recorded thirty minutes of me talking to a wall. The chief said they’re desperate for leads and what am I going to give him? The most I’ve done today is chase two groupies off the property.”
“They got inside the gate?”
“Don’t ask me how. Both of them were carrying ‘Free Lucas Blackthorn’ signs, which is the first time I’ve seen that. We’ve gone from interest to protest and now I’m clocking more time cruising the perimeter of this place than actually inside it.” Officer Miller’s shoes echoed in the stairwell as we descended to the first floor. Next to her, my tread was almost silent. We badged into the main hall and toward the front entrance, where shards of sunlight sliced the walls.
“I need a favor.”
“There were more of them this morning.” She nodded past the doors into the parking lot and beyond. “He wants out and they want in.”
“I’m trying to piece together the Blackthorns’ last days before they disappeared and I need to find a copy of a police report. Josiah Blackthorn was arrested, no charges filed, in northern Minnesota.”
She paused near the security desk, putting her hat on. “That’d be public record. You know how to fill out forms, right?”
“It’s urgent. And there might be a related case, but I don’t know the details. I wouldn’t know what to request.”
The men in ward two had exhibited acute stress response symptoms at the sight of Officer Miller’s uniform. Paleness. Dilated pupils. Shaking. I kept my hands still and waited while she looked me up and down. “You’re his speech therapist. Your job is just to help him talk, right?”
“Maybe it’ll give us something to talk about.”
After a beat she nodded, slipped her sunglasses on, and told me to email her the details of the arrest.
* * *
Officer Miller and I had gone through the Congdon orientation together along with a roomful of other new hires and volunteers, back when I’d first started as an orderly and she was rotating in as our liaison to the Duluth police force. For two full days we watched outdated videos and reviewed policies while she compulsively checked her phone like she was praying for a domestic disturbance to save her from the PowerPoint. I assumed she’d drawn the short straw for this gig until the end of the orientation, when Dr. Mehta joined us and invited the group to share any experiences that had compelled us to work at Congdon. A moment of silence suffocated the room before, one by one, everyone started telling their stories. Someone had a bipolar friend. Another person’s father was diagnosed with an antisocial personality disorder. One of the volunteers suffered from bulimia for most of her childhood until realizing she needed help. Every person in the room spoke up except the two of us, but then—after the tissues had been passed and all the bolstering smiles began to fade—Officer Miller cleared her throat.
“I had a brother who was off, always low, never wanted to get help, never even wanted anyone to look at him. But I saw him. I saw him right up to the first morning of his junior year when he slit his wrists in the bathtub.” Her eyes shimmered with deep pools of tears. I’d never seen an eye hold on to that much water, refusing to let it go.
That was my cue. I should have reached out for Officer Miller’s hand or touched her forearm and told them how every night when my mother tucked me into bed I could see fault lines of pain cracking through her body, how the tighter I hugged her the more she crumbled away, as if the density of my love was too much to withstand, until one night she broke completely. She left a note on my nightstand, went to the bathroom, and ate two bottles of aspirin.
Everyone at Congdon had a story. Some of us had more than one.
“I used to be a patient here,” I murmured and picked at a chipped spot on the table until human resources started handing out badges and explaining the building’s layers of security.
* * *
What makes someone disappear?
After my mom’s suicide attempt, we all tried to pretend things were fine. Mom cleaned the house and lingered in the shadows outside my school, waiting to walk me home. She showed me how to make grilled cheese and ramen noodles and how to tell the difference between gabbro and basalt. We built a rock garden in a corner of the yard and I memorized every mineral, their Mohs scale hardness, whether they were igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic, knowledge that seemed more vital than anything I was learning at school. Dad spent hours analyzing the composition of the lake bed, the shoals, all the underwater hazards that had wrecked countless ships like the Bannockburn. Maybe he thought it was something they could share, the intersection of rock and water, but we both saw how her eyes drifted off the map to places we couldn’t follow.
During Dad’s busy season in the summer, she took me up to her family cabin near the Boundary Waters, just her and me, and that’s where she seemed the strongest. We paddled through lake after lake, silent amid the towering pines that surrounded us like a cathedral, our feet baptized on the shores of every portage. When we returned to Duluth in the fall everything seemed dirtier, harder. She stopped waiting for me after school. Then one day she accepted a job conducting a copper study on the Iron Range—Minnesota’s mining belt that had once turned Duluth into a bo
omtown—packed a bag and left us a note saying she might not be back. Two months later she quit the job and began sending me rocks in the mail: a hunk of granite at the first snowfall, a nugget of amethyst for spring, carefully polished agates gleaming like birthday candles. I kept a rock and mineral field guide by my bed and studied them, trying to interpret whether a white hue meant purity or sorrow. Could I dissect her state of mind from an intricate banding pattern? There were never any return addresses on the boxes and the postmarks came from further and further away—North Dakota, Wyoming. I tried googling the towns, searching for her in newspaper photos and company directories, but the rocks were the only evidence she existed until one day even they stopped coming. She disappeared without a physical or digital trace. It was a gradual abandonment, like inching slowly into deeper, more frigid water until the bottom gives way. Was that better than Officer Miller’s brother, two swift cuts and a last cascade spilled neatly into the tub’s drain? They were both gone, leaving no path for anyone to follow.
If Josiah had left a path, I was going to find it.
While I waited for Officer Miller to find the arrest records, I began hunting, looking for other families who’d turned away from society. There had to be a precedent, a pattern. As the gales started battering the house, I curled up with my laptop and searched. The first and most famous case was the Lykov family of Siberia, and after I read everything I could find about them I discovered another story, this time in a different generation on a new tilt of the globe.
Ho Van Thanh had lived a quiet life until the Vietnam War spilled into his village and he watched his family die in an explosion. Some accounts said a mine blew up, others that the village came under siege by American bombers, and even the identity of the family members who died varied depending on who was telling the story, but they all agreed on what happened next. Thanh scooped up his infant son, Lang, and fled into the jungle. Eventually the war ended and life got back to normal, but Ho Van Thanh never returned. He raised Lang in a handmade treehouse where they ate corn and fruit. They caught animals in traps, made their clothes from tree bark, and every time the nearby villages grew and expanded, Thanh led his son further into the jungle, retreating almost to the top of a mountain in order to stay hidden from the world outside.
